What slowed down disaster response to Katrina? Let's look for the lawyers

By
Jack Kelly

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We might have had a faster response to Katrina, and prevented the 9/11
attacks altogether, if only we'd followed the advice of Dick the Butcher.
Dick the Butcher is the character in Shakespeare's play Henry VI who says:
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

Dick is a repulsive character. Shakespeare's point is that lawyers are vital
to the functioning of civilized society. They are the oil in the gears of
commerce, the engine of democracy.

But when we have too many lawyers, and we pay them too much deference, that
oil can turn into sand.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin reportedly was reluctant to order a mandatory
evacuation for fear of lawsuits.

G-d knows why Gov. Kathleen Blanco dragged her feet  dithering seems to be
her modus operandi  but I suspect lawyers had a lot to do with it.

My friend Ralph Peters told me his sources in the Pentagon told him lawyers
for FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security spent the weekend before
Katrina struck arguing about what they could or couldn't do  the emphasis
was on couldn't  absent certain permissions from Blanco.

Former members of Able Danger, a military intelligence unit, have claimed
they had identified hijack leader Mohamed Atta and the members of his cell
more than a year before 9/11, and had tried to pass this information on to
the FBI, but were forbidden to do so on the advice of Pentagon lawyers.

There are lawyers who can act promptly and decisively in a crisis (see
Giuliani, Rudy). But they are the exception rather than the rule. By
training and temperament, lawyers are more likely to flash a yellow light
than a green one.

It is this fundamental characteristic, my friend Tom Lipscomb told me, that
caused a young Donald Rumsfeld to argue that lawyers should be barred from
holding public office. It was probably not helpful that both Michael Brown,
the head of FEMA when Katrina struck, and Michael Chertoff, his boss at the
Department of Homeland Security, are lawyers.

The pernicious impact lawyers can have in a crisis is compounded by
bureaucracy.

Bureaucracies typically move at a torpid pace, and insist on following the
rules even when the rules make no sense. So firemen were prevented from
rescuing Katrina victims until they had received a lecture on sexual
harassment policy.

The more layers of bureaucrats through which a decision must pass, the
slower the response. Yet Washington's response to any crisis is to create
larger bureaucracies.

Consider the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in response to
the intelligence failures of the FBI and CIA leading to 9/11, but did
nothing to address the intelligence failures of the FBI and CIA.

It made enormous sense to combine the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, the Customs Service, the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard into a
single agency to guard our borders. But throwing in FEMA, the Transportation
Security Administration and the various other cats and dogs created an
unmanageable witches' brew in which there would inevitably be more turf
battles than real reform.

Having mucked up DHS, Congress, acting on the recommendations of the 9/11
Commission, proceeded to create a DHS for the Intelligence Community.

The primary purpose of the Director of National Intelligence was not to
address the intelligence failures of the FBI and CIA which led to 9/11, but
to subject the various defense intelligence agencies (mostly blameless in
9/11) to an additional layer of bureaucratic supervision. We needed more and
better spies, analysts and linguists. We got more managers.

Organizations have consequences. There are thousands of good people in FEMA
and DHS who are frustrated by the sluggishness the bureaucratic monstrosity
they are in imposes.

Leaner, more focused organizations are better. FEMA and the Transportation
Security Administration should be withdrawn from DHS.

The only bureaucracy which moves rapidly in a crisis is the military. I
think it would be a mistake to make the military a "first responder" in
natural disasters, but FEMA should be reorganized along military lines.

And the head of FEMA should always be either a National Guard general or a
Coast Guard admiral. There are some jobs which require adult supervision.

Too many of these are held by political hacks.

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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a
deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan
administration. Comment by clicking here.